Jason Miller interviews Michael Pozmantier, program manager of the Transition to Practice in the Science and Technology Directorate at DHS.

The Homeland Security Department is bringing eight cutting edge cyber technologies
before the money people in Silicon Valley this week.

The Transition to Practice program is pitching to venture capitalists, investors
and other companies in California the potential of federally-funded cyber tools.
DHS said it believes these software and hardware products could significantly
improve the security of computers and networks.

"The program seeks to find mature federally-funded cybersecurity research and
development that projects into commercial markets, which further projects into
securing the networks of the homeland security enterprise," said Michael
Pozmantier, the program manager of the Transition to Practice in the Science and
Technology Directorate at DHS. "The homeland security enterprise [includes]
federal, state, local, private sector critical infrastructure. We are really
interested in getting technologies out that traditionally haven't made it out from
the federal lab into the market where they can have the most benefit for the
cybersecurity of the nation."

The Transition to Practice program started about 18 months ago, and these eight
technologies are among the first DHS is showing off.

"We are going to areas outside of DHS that are doing federally-funded cyber R&D.
So in the first year, the first eight technologies we chose are from the Energy
Department affiliated national laboratories," he said. "I go to the labs. I'll
spend a day or two at each laboratory seeing demonstrations of the technologies,
talking to the researchers. The first year we went to eight DoE national
laboratories, saw 35 technologies and we chose eight. These are the eight we are
working with right now."

Commercially viable R&D

DHS first presented the programs to federal agencies last winter. Earlier this
month, it showed financial
services companies in New York how the technologies worked.

But going to California's Silicon Valley is the first event focusing on
commercializing the cybersecurity tools.

"If you want to get to where cybersecurity and IT innovation is happening, the
places for that are Silicon Valley, and D.C. is emerging for that as well,
particularly for government focused technology. That's why we are doing the events
on both side of the country. We believe there is enough of a community on either
side that we can talk to all those people and take the technology to where the
people are, as opposed to expecting them to come to us where we don't get the
penetration that we want," Pozmantier said. "This is the first time we've done
these events so these communities don't really know about us until we come to them
to do these kinds of events. This is a really big outreach on our part to make
sure they are aware the federal government is doing this kind of research and is
looking to provide the benefit of that research to the community."

He added the event is trying to attract three types of companies or people:

R&D community

Cyber defender, which includes people in charge on a day-to-day basis of
defending public or private sector networks

Commercialization partners, which includes venture capitalists, investors,
system integrators that would bring the technologies to market to get broader
adoption of the technologies

DHS just finished reviewing a second round of technologies from the Defense
Department's affiliated labs such as Johns Hopkins, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command for demonstration later
this year. Pozmantier said last spring he visited 11 other labs to review 60
technologies. In the end, DHS chose nine.

"The way we ultimately select them is looking at the problem it solves, trying to
confirm the maturity level of it because it's got to be at the point that it's
ready to be piloted," he said. "If it's not to that point where it's gone through
the proof of concept and it's ready for pilot, then we can't select it for that
point in time, and we will keep it in on our tracking list for the following
year."

Pozmantier said the one-day event scheduled for Thursday will include
presentations of the eight technologies and then one-on-one meetings between
audience members and the technology researchers.

Intrusion detection

Among the technologies DHS is demonstrating this
week is one from the Los Alamos National Laboratory that is an intrusion detection
system, called PathScan.

"This one is different than your traditional IDS in that it uses anomaly detection
as opposed to signature based detection to find different things going on the
network," Pozmantier said. "It will baseline what's going on inside the internal
network and look for different traffic patterns that might stand out, and then
alert the cyber analysts in charge of those networks to do some forensics on those
things."